Beyond the Stage Pass: Access to Staged Reading Series

Be among the first to discover the hottest new up-and-coming playwrights and other theater talents from DC's acclaimed Locally Grown: Community Supported Art Festival with this special pass from Theater J. Check out any and/or all of the staged readings of these exciting new works, Monday nights through June 2013. Also included is a ticket to a Friday afternoon Tea@2 reading of award-winner Ernie Joselovitz's Backstage, a family drama set around New York's dying Yiddish theater scene of the 1920s. Please see the full event description for more information on the lineup.

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April 15, 2013 at 7:30pm: _The Return to Latin _by Allyson Currin

The idea for Allyson Currin’s play, The Return to Latin came from a discussion hosted by Arena Stage called Women of a Certain Age. Currin describes the result of the discussion, sharing, “I was tasked, privately, at the end of the discussion, by three of the best actors I know … to write a play for women in their fifties as those women really are. Not caregivers or grandmothers or dowagers or any tired stereotypes, but real women, who are smart, sexy and powerful …There are so few plays that give women in their fifties (and beyond) real and complicated journeys. This play, while comic, will not shy away from the small humiliations embedded in women’s journeys as they age, and the very real fear that, in middle age, a woman’s ‘chance’ might have passed her by.”

Joselovitz’s Backstage takes place on the cusp on the 1920s in New York. The play follows recently widowed Yuli Muskin, producer and lead actor at his family’s Yiddish Theatre on the Lower East Side, as he struggles to hold together both his family and his dying business. But with an art form that seems destined to become obsolete and a daughter with her sights set on Broadway, holding on to the way things were seems ever more impossible.

May 6, 2013 at 7:30pm: House Beautiful by Liz Maestri

Maestri’s current one-act in development, House Beautiful, demonstrates her clear sense of what interests her as a playwright. “My work is often influenced by a fascination with things supernatural and found in nature.”

May 20, 2013 at 7:30pm: The Monastery by Randy Baker

Through the Locally Grown Festival, Baker will be developing a play called _The Monastery. He describes the piece as _an exploration of “a character who is immortal but cursed with forgetfulness, never to remember her past lives. Now she’s in our era and destruction — both personal and literal — follows her wherever she goes.”

June 10, 2013 at 7:30pm: A Grand Design by DW Gregory

The piece that Gregory will be developing with Theater J is entitled A Grand Design, a three-actor piece inspired in part by the DC sniper shootings a decade ago. It is a dark comedy that, as Gregory puts it, “wrestles with the tradeoffs we make between security and satisfaction, and how those calculations are thrown into disarray when the shooting starts.”

June 24, 2013 at 7:30pm: GBoro (Working Title) by Malcolm Pelles

The play “centers on the Greensboro Massacre, an event in 1979 where American Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen opened fire on Black and Jewish industrial workers and members of the Communist Worker’s party that were leading an anti-Klan rally.” He goes on to note that, “My parents are survivors of the massacre, and by dramatizing this piece of my family history I hope to inspire audiences to contemplate love, justice and sacrifice.”

Please note: This pass does not include tickets to full mainstage productions.

Each event’s regular price runs from $5-$10.

About the Ticket Supplier: Theater J

Theater J has emerged as one of the most distinctive, progressive and respected Jewish theaters in North America by virtue of its ambitious range of programming and the bold, imaginative artistry of its playwrights, directors, designers and actors. A program of the Washington DC Jewish Community Center, Theater J works in frequent collaboration with other components of the Washington DCJCC’s Morris Cafritz Center for the Arts: the Washington Jewish Film Festival, and the Literary and Music Department.